About the job
🌸 Role introduction 🌸 We are building a shiny, new, ambitious game and would love to find an experienced gameplay engineer with proven skills and experience in creating complex gameplay systems that are polished, maintainable and extensible. Someone who equally loves throwing on some headphones and knocking out some new gameplay or gathering together team members to discuss how best to improve an existing system. This is a senior role, so we're expecting you to have commercial experience you can use to help mentor others. 🌸 What you'll be doing 🌸 Taking complete ownership of the architecture, implementation and maintenance of new gameplay systems. Communicating and collaborating with QA as well as crafting automated testing solutions to ensure systems are tested thoroughly to create bug-free and maintainable code. Taking pride in creating highly-polished gameplay, where every detail has been thought through with all the extra touches it needs to bring players joy. Finding the best solution for the problem — able to collaborate with all related team members to understand the best way forward for a problem, if that's a new tool, a change to an existing system or something new. Able to debug and optimize gameplay related issues in new or existing code. 🌸 Our dream engineer 🌸 Experienced with gameplay programming, having shipped at least one commercial, complex 3D game having designed several systems. Able to look at the game cohesively. Looking beyond what it says on the task at how it fits into the game and asking the right questions before building. Adaptable: able to jump between UI, tools, cinematics, game code, or whatever is needed for today and quickly get up to speed on the existing system. Independent: they love a big complex problem to sink their teeth into and have a plan A through Z on what to try before they get stuck. A great communicator, who knows when it's the right time to ask for help, when to ask for feedback and how to ask more questions or to communicate ideas with the team. Loves to help others. Whether that be a designer trying to hook things up in a new system or helping a fellow developer resolve a merge conflict, sharing what you know is something that brings joy. Kind and supportive: They love giving people feedback, but they'll celebrate wins more than they point out areas for improvement. 🏗️ Our tech stack 🏗️ We work with a customised Unity 6 engine, and build all tools and technology in-house; including custom rendering, animation and UI systems. Our lead platforms are Windows, Mac, iOS and Nintendo Switch. We also stay in C# for custom tools outside of Unity and for our servers. Git+LFS for source control, GitLab for CI, JIRA for task and bug tracking. 🌏 This is a full time, permanent and permanently-remote-working position 🌏 This position is 38 hours a week Work around your family and personal commitments. Work any hours of the day and week that make sense for you. We generally communicate over Slack or email, with occasional voice/video chat when convenient. You will need to have some reasonable time zone overlap with both Melbourne and the US at the same time. We have a strict policy to not hire in Europe or any time zone where only night work would be possible to achieve that. We'll be trusting you to be self-motivated and able to manage your own time and workload; we won't be micromanaging your task list. 🌸 Salary 🌸 This is a full-time permanent position with 6 months probation. $120,000 AUD ($85,000 USD) annual base salary. 🌸 About Studio Drydock 🌸 Studio Drydock is making games for diverse audiences, and it's super-important to us that our team is just as unique and varied. We're an international team with team members in Australia, US, Canada, New Zealand and Costa Rica. We make cozy games everyone can enjoy and our first title was the highly-acclaimed Wylde Flowers on PC, Switch and Apple Arcade. We believe in making games that reflect the world we want to live in. We make cozy games about real-feeling people living their interesting lives. You'll never find guns or explosions in our games, but you might shed a tear for a loved one or become romantically involved with a werewolf. Studio Drydock is built on a foundation of support and independence in equal measure. We value our team members' unique experiences and trust them to do their jobs the way they know how, knowing people will reach out when they need it.
